How GNOME and KDE Spend Their Money 167
bluescarni writes 'A side-by-side analysis of GNOME's and KDE's quarterly reports sheds some light (and dispels some myths) on the nature and the quantity of the funds of the two projects.'
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How GNOME and KDE Spend Their Money
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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
Well, kind of obvious... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Well, kind of obvious... (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason why KDE is growing so much is because their community is insanely motivated. The only other community I've seen more motivated is the Drupal community. KDE is able to project a halo of (mostly valid) hype around itself which attracts users and hence contributors, which results in more features and hype, and so on.
OTOH, a lot of GNOME development is done by RedHat/Fedora dudes, and I constantly get the feeling that they are a closed book and don't pay attention to engaging the community and gaining contributors. There are exceptions of course, such as Richard Hughes [gnome.org] and Dan Williams [gnome.org].
Re:Well, kind of obvious... (Score:3, Interesting)
As GNOME foundation is running out of money, will this change the major distro's support, or will they stump up the shortfall when Gnome needs it?
Personally, I'd like to see Redhat, Debian or Ubuntu take KDE as the default. There's no reason not to now, and I'd like to see the competition between the desktop environments increase, that should drive more features and polish! If the KDE community have made such significant feature updates without being a major distro's default says a lot (of good) about it.
On the other hand, maybe the facty that linux runs Gnome is the reason it has never been popular on the desktop. A switch to KDE might be enough to make people try it, like it and stick with it! (yeah, sure, dream on :) )
Both (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used both environments over a long period of time on dedicated linux desktops. Both are competent products. Gnome looks good under Ubuntu 9.04. KDE 4.3 looks awesome as well. Both are sufficiently feature rich. Both add features rapidly on an ongoing basis. Both are solid products. The money is being well spent no matter how you look at it. I like that KDE has about a quarter million dollars banked. It shows strength and greater longevity.
My personal favorite, after using gnome for years, is KDE (which I have used since KDE 4.2). On a regular basis I see fixes and upgrades, though there still are some annoying aspects to it. After 25 years in computing and having dealt with Windows for most of that, KDE is probably the best and most well rounded desktop manager, even well beyond windows Win7, and certainly Vista. I have 4 Vista boxes in shop and I have a Win7 RC box for testing. I also have 3 Apple OSX systems. Nothing generally impresses me about them. I've watched compiz, beryl, and kwin turn into super feature rich, well balanced, polished and tailored products that in many ways existed before Vista was released.
Let's just say that I'm very impressed that these two organizations are producing products comparable or better than the competition. It is good to see that they are doing so much with so little.
Re:Well, kind of obvious... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's kind of the impression I've always gotten from GNOME and KDE - all the way back to 1.x versions of GNOME and KDE.
GNOME has always had a very "business" feel to it, almost like it took a great number of its design decisions from CDE or UNIX heritage and tradition - not only in design decisions but also in philosophical, organizational ones. Unfortunately, it seems to me that a lot of those decisions result in a lack of usability on the desktop/GUI where they might work just fine with CLI. Organizationally, it stifles things.
KDE has always had more of an "open" approach; they've encouraged the fanaticism, as well as community involvement and decision making. It's also (arguably) a much better framework - as evidenced by the more complete ports to other OSes, QT cross development/kdevelop, and companies like Nokia picking QT for future development of mobile devices.
When it comes down to GUI development, an "amateur" or non-hardcore programmer is going to look at the two and say: I can either develop on GNOME/GTK and use crappy somewhat OO C or a 3rd party binding like Python (seemingly very popular) or I can write it in C++ with a Visual Studio-like interface (and I've also got some other options there). For many, it's a no-brainer, so QT gets a lot more developers.
Re:insanely motivated (Score:3, Interesting)
Hah. It just so happens that the only package in Fedora's repos with "hate" in its name, does just that, so install it (and then add the applet) if you prefer an absolutely spotless desktop. Of course, it'd be nice to be able to more simply disable it without using a workaround package.
$ yum info \*hate\*
Loaded plugins: changelog, fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit, security
Installed Packages
Name : kde-plasma-ihatethecashew
Arch : x86_64
Version : 0.3
Release : 2.fc11
Size : 55 k
Repo : installed
Summary : Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display
URL : http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/I+HATE+the+Cashew?content=91009 [kde-look.org]
License : GPLv2
Description: Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display.
Re:Well, kind of obvious... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also (arguably) a much better framework
I have to admit, the KDE stack's design always bothered me, and I used GNOME (well, mostly I used Macs, but I did fire up a GUI on my servers now and then). But when GNOME started heading towards .NET, I looked again, and KDE had re-done their architecture into something very elegant (KDE4). Now, at that time, KDE 4.1 had just come out, and was a steaming pile of dung, but then 4.2 was much better, and 4.3 is really solid. Meanwhile, Nokia got on board, did the Free-er license, and the roadmap ahead looks really good.
4.3 is ready to try. It's still not as good as a Mac, but it works pretty well. I heard something recently that some of the best features won't make 4.5, but perhaps 4.6 will be ready to take on the competition.